New campaign will see thousands set to abandon creature comforts and go wild outdoors

Climate change is important but we need to concentrate too on our immediate environment, the Prime Minister’s former strategy adviser Steve Hilton told an audience at Hay Festival last week. “We need a fundamental rethink [of] humanity’s relationship with the natural world that we inhabit,” he said. He argued for “moving the pendulum back towards the system of our ancestors, in which we benefit from nature while simultaneously giving back to and co-existing with it”.